I just wish she’d given me one for curing insomnia.

1. If you can’t say something interesting, don’t say anything at all.

   This, of course, is not what she really said, but it is the cardinal rule of fiction.

2. Sit down quietly and share with your sister.

   This one she said all the time.

   Because it’s not about me. It’s not even about you. It’s about sharing this amazing, complicated, poignant world with the reader, and if we can’t share nicely they’re not going to follow us around begging.

3. If you don’t learn to make your bed, no one will marry you.

   This one she also said, and I’m not going to use up space here recording my many witty adolescent replies. Suffice it to say that she was mistaken, and nobody in my house now is any good with hospital corners.

   However, she was correct that if we don’t learn how to shape and tidy our manuscripts no one will ever read them. They’re incredibly lumpy, uneven, and full of missing socks in their early drafts. Readers find them extremely uncomfortable and cannot relax.

   This is a bad thing.

4. Don’t be a smart-aleck.

   This is also a bad thing.

   We’re all very clever and amusing people, I know, in the privacy of our own heads and usually a number of hours after it doesn’t matter anymore. I infused my own early novels with a whole plethora of snarky asides and snappy comebacks.

   Turns out Grandma was right on the money with this one too, though.

   Readers don’t want untutored attempts at snark. They want either real, one-of-a-kind, death-defying humor that makes them spontaneously laugh out loud or no smartypants nonsense at all.

5. Stop kicking the table leg.

   No kidding, people. I know we all get intensely frustrated at the state of the publishing industry these days. It is indeed an intensely frustrating state, in which unknown writers become less and less likely to see publication every single time someone buys a best seller at Walmart.

   But the truth is we were already complaining about the state of the industry decades ago, when it seems in retrospect that we actually had it fairly good.

   We need to just stop annoying people and buckle down to the hard work.

6. Wipe your feet before you walk on clean floors.

   Leo Buscaglia tells the story of meeting a famous Buddhist lama and walking in the garden with this gentle little man, yammering on and on and on about himself and his big, brilliant ideas and how important they all were, until the gentle little man turned suddenly and slapped him right in the face.

   “Stop walking in my head with your dirty feet!” the lama exclaimed.

   This is excellent advice for all of us—but especially for writers.

7. Keep your sticky fingers off the wallpaper.

   Again, the reader has their own big, brilliant ideas, which they love far more than they are ever going to love ours. It is our job to show them their own lovely wallpaper, not muck it up getting our fingerprints all over it.

8. Don’t make me tell Grandpa.

   You know who Grandpa is? That’s right. The reader. And Grandpa always gets the last word.

9. Machst gut.

   Actually, it was my great-grandmother who said this, the German granddaughter of pioneers, a woman who lived to be 93 and, at the end of her life, began seeing the ghost of her husband in her room at night.

   Make it good.

   If you’re going to be haunted, you know, it had better be worth your while.

10. You can cry on me.

    Grandma also said this, for which I will always love her.

    There’s a lot of grief in first struggling for years to get our beautiful dreams down in words and then finding someone who wants to read them. I don’t care how brilliant or talented or experienced we are, our kindness to each other is truly the most important thing we have to give.

11. Come back and see us again soon, honey.

    Because when you get right down to it, it’s all about dedication and long-term commitment—commitment and good-heartedness and being in this world with others. We’re able to share our wonderful fictional adventures with the reader only if they add significantly to the reader’s life.

    And if we can’t develop the habit of producing great stories—not just one, but one after another, for as long as we expect others to pay attention—we must content ourselves with being readers.

    After all, everyone loves them.

1. You’re not going to get rich. You’re probably not even going to be able to pay your bills. In fact, money is going to turn out to be the last reason to do this. I know—you guys hate it like blazes that I keep telling you this. (Huffington Post). But keep reading (or skip ahead) to 7, anyway.
2. Your friends and family will LOVE IT. They’ll start following you everywhere, waiting for famous people to accost you so they can be the shy, self-deprecating second person, blushing and elbowing you and saying, “I’m just the sister. Really—we always knew they [pointing] were a genius.” Humorous, eye-rolling, palms-up shrug. This will be fun for awhile and then become intensely annoying, especially when the famous people never materialize. Your grandparents will keep your book on their coffee table until the day they die (when you will inherit it back).
3. Your book will have a really strange reaction to publication. It’s going to open itself up in the middle of the night the night before your publication date and rearrange all the words to make you look like an idiot. It will choose one obscure paragraph in one chapter to arrange exactly the opposite—so beautifully and profoundly and perfectly that, as god is your witness, you know for a fact you did not write that. The rest of it. . .yeah, it kind of sounds like you.
4. You will spend at least a week in an alternate universe in which your entire head is bigger than your body and your hair is actually bigger than your head. You will have eyes like a fly, facing in all directions at once. Your neck will be a thin string tied rather inexpertly to the base of your head. Although the view from up there will be extraordinary, the bobbing up & down will be so disorienting that it will affect your ability to speak clearly.
5. You will come back from this alternate universe a humbler and better person.
6. You will suddenly hate your book, hate everything about your book, hate everybody else’s books, too, and lock yourself in your attic with your dreams and your words and your vision and begin the real task of writing what you know you can write, what you’ve had inside you all along. You just needed the self-confidence of getting published to bring it out.
7. Your boss will call you up at home and tell you to get back to work or you’re fired. And you’ll go—but you’ll still be thinking all the time about what’s going on in your attic. Eventually it will occur to you that this is also how you were living before you were published. And that’s the reason to do this. . .because this is a wonderful way to live.

100. I don’t know a hundred other things about being a published author. A commenter said readers like really big numbers, and I thought I’d roll with that. But even if I did know a hundred other things, you guys would never read them all, much less remember them. And how helpful is that?

GO WRITE.

Ask Victoria.

That’s what Therese Walsh dubbed it when we came up with the idea of an editor’s advice column on the new, up-coming Writer Unboxed newsletter.

We’d been wanting to collaborate for a long time, take our guest appearances on each other’s blogs to the next level.

As soon as we thought of moving my advice column to her newsletter, we knew we’d hit on the right idea. So we’ve been hustling for the past few weeks to make it happen.Therese and her partner Kathleen have solicited questions from the Writer Unboxed Facebook community, I’ve put on my editorial thinking-cap, and we’ve created the advice column we hope will serve aspiring writers best.

And today we went live.

Hurrah! Horn-blowing & kazoos!

However, the newsletter is still in development, so we went live on the Writer Unboxed blog, a demo of the column as it will appear in the newsletter, so you can all get a window into what’s in store. Ain’t life grand?

We’re over there right now answering the reader question:

Dear Victoria,

Aside from meticulous proofreading, how can we, as writers, make your job easier?

Please join us! On Ask Victoria.

1. It always seems like such a good idea at the time.

   Who has not begun a story with the gripping, overwhelming conviction that this is the best idea ever?

2. It gets intensely complicated, overblown, and unwieldly really, really fast.

   Writing fiction is enormously complex and involves far more facets than can ever be entirely remembered or even explained. We try and try and try to simplify the basics so we can build a sense of competence and an inner sensory map—a body memory of how to navigate these complexities—but the sheer number of layers always makes the overall picture invisible from any particular vantage point.

3. It involves a whole lot of little, nickpicky details you simply can’t see coming.

   Fiction is all details: the details of character, the details of plot and subplot and plot thread, the details of setting, the details of tens and tens of thousands of words and sentences. Detail overload. . .and yet every one of them is essential.

4. The exact aspect of any and all illumination is crucial.

   If we don’t have complete control over where we shine the light when we create, we can’t hope to show our audience what we want them to see.

5. Repeated attempts to accomplish the same piece of the project over and over again becomes something akin to hammering jello on porcelain.

   Revision is massage taken to the point of pummeling. The breakage can be, eventually, deafening.

6. Stagefright is a constant.

   Although the camera acts as an audience in the external world, our critical faculties act as an on-going internal audience, so that the accumulation of silent tut-tut’s can be paralyzing if we listen.

7. Halfway through, you’re guaranteed to forget what you’re doing.

   We are a simple species, and one of the most predictable of our reflexes is the urge to mentally step away when things stop being fun. This is especially true right about when we’ve acquired 36,000 of the 72,000 words we need.

8. Freezing in the headlights is sometimes the only thing that makes sense.

   Fortunately, the fact that none of this is live means we can freeze for as long as we like. It’s never detrimental to the final product, and it’s often the key to quality.

9. It turns out you don’t actually have a single, consistent voice.

   Did you know this about yourself? Even when you’re talking? Me neither.

10. The longer you struggle, the more obvious it becomes this can’t possibly end well.

    I really don’t have an answer for this.

A writer falls over a cliff and is clinging helplessly to a vine while two editors crouch on the edge, shouting advice. Suddenly the writer sees the most beautiful strawberry in the world just out of reach.

“Reach for it!” cries the first editor. “A perfect thing is worth the sacrifice of your life!”

“Don’t reach for it!” cries the second editor. “It is in toil and dedication that success lies!”

“My novel’s a piece of shit!” cries the writer and jumps off the cliff.

Hey, welcome to 2012! We’ve had such a luxurious vacation catching up on our lives around here and cleaning our offices and writing stories and all that good stuff. Now we’re gearing up for the new year in that very special way that we writers have: with panic.

First I want to thank all of you with my deepest gratitude for your nominations for the Write to Done Top 10 Blogs for Writers Contest. You guys got me into the Top 20 Blogs for Writers, which is exactly where I hoped to be. Although I am greatly honored to have been one of the Top 10 last year, I spent the first three months of 2011 working my heinie off trading guest posts with the other nine folks, and I suspect I am not the only one of them to have trembled at the thought of doing that all over again.

So thank you. Thank you so much.

Now, I have a few new things lined up for this blog in 2012:

1. Video

   My son has become quite a video afficionado, as can be seen in the trailer he made for The Art & Craft of Fiction. And he’s going to be making short videos of me talking about craft, little five-minute versions of the video interview Joanna Penn did with me last fall.

2. Writer & Editor Jokes

   I’m sorry. I’m apologizing in advance for the groaners. This is what happens when an editor spends a little too much of her holiday vacation exploring the possibilities of chai and rum.

3. New Guest Column

   I’m not going to let the cat out of the bag just yet because we’re still working out the details, but within a few weeks I’ll be able to announce my regular guest column on the upcoming newsletter for one of the best blogs for writers in existence. I’m extremely excited to be working with these folks. Stay tuned!

4. A Writer’s New Year’s Resolutions

   And these are just for today:

   • Lose weight

     Trim, trim, trim. Cut, cut, cut. My manuscripts will lose their flab and tone their muscle until they can eject a reader to 5000 feet without leaving the ground.

   • Eat healthy

     Out with cheap crap! In with the greats! I will devote my precious reading time to only those writers whose dedication and talents have shaped and continue to shape this craft we all love, and I will resist the urge to waste my time on mindless drivel just because everyone else is doing it.

   • Exercise

     I will practice my writing skills until for every 1000 words I hope to publish I can proudly boast 10,000 words of honing my craft. I will spend far less time talking about writing and far more time doing it. I will focus on the sheer tangible pleasure of writing—because that’s the reason I’m a writer.

All of which leads to the greatest mystery of all, the purpose of fiction and the purpose of everything in general: discovering what makes life worthwhile.

Meaning.

How does being a writer help you find meaning?

Know that meaning exists.

It’s out there. It might not be intrinsic to this mortal coil—why are we here? where did we come from? where will we go? are there any answers? who knows?—but it is intrinsic to the self-awareness of the living. There is a spark inside you that animates the body in which you live, that makes it walk and talk and learn to play cards.

The fact that you are aware of this spark is profoundly meaningful. What are you? You are alive.

And the fact that you have the written word through which to explore that awareness will lead you to another question: “Who am I?” What does it mean to you, deep down inside, that you are alive?

Know you have to search to find it.

The meaning of life is not going to be served to you passively, like monetized blogs and television commercials. The only thing of value that you will ever get without trying is life itself (and even that goes away if you lie down and refuse to feed or clothe or nurture yourself).

As it happens, writing is excellent work for philosophers and spiritual seekers and questioners because writing isn’t easy. Writing is, in fact, quite a merciless angel, and it’s going to kick your butt. It is—for those of us who love it more than anything else—the ultimate metaphor for quest, the quest for meaning.

It is the powerful struggle with that metaphor—in all its convoluted, inexplicable, word-heavy impossibility—that makes the answers to our questions about life matter.

Understand paradox.

So when we have accepted that there is meaning to our lives, and sought that meaning through this extraordinary craft that is our chosen tool for revelation, and faced that meaning in those ephemeral moments of brilliance in our writing, and accepted our inevitable thwarting at its hands (which thwarting, I’m afraid, really is inevitable), we come to understand something.

We come to understand that a thing is true only because its opposite is also true.

We understand that for everything we’ve learned to express through the written word there is an equal and opposite thing yet to be expressed, and that no matter how long and hard we work at this craft, or how talented we were to start with, or how skilled we become in time, we will never write everything we could.

When we grapple with the potential buried deep inside that paradox, we come to grips with our unlimited freedom to write anything, although it will never be everything. That epiphany allows us to choose.

And those choices illuminate the meanings of our individual lives.

Our choices. They’re who we are.

Happy New Year, everyone.

We’ve also been remembering cause-&-effect, because that’s what everything is all about, and don’t let anybody tell you anything different.

So let’s talk today about community among writers, all of us here in this hapless little rowboat on the high seas together, sharing the benches and taking turns at the oars and scratching our heads over the constellations and occasionally pulling someone back into the boat before the sharks get them.

This is where gratitude will always lead you—to human bonding.

Be in it for what you have to give.

I honestly, sincerely believe in the power of modeling behavior, so I’ve been here on this blog for almost three years now teaching for free what I know about writing fiction, hoping that you will take away not only craft but a sense of compassion for your companions in this writing life.

I’m not going to deliberately lose my house to the bank, but I am aware that writing is not a get-rich-quick scheme and that even the most experienced mentors are no better than writers have ever been at making more than a sort of lower-middle-class living at this work we love best. I wake up every single day and remind myself what it was like to be young and and broke and passionately in love with words and to have nowhere to go for help.

Give as generously as you can. Don’t be bossy, and don’t assume you know more than those with greater experience, but show compassion to your fellow writers and share the camaraderie with kindness and an open heart.

Serve your turn at the oars.

Be thoughtful about what you need to take.

Nobody’s an infinite well of resource. We all give, and we all take. We pass the torch from hand to hand, from experienced to innocent, from generation to generation. Where you stand now I once stood, and when you move up the ladder of knowledge tomorrow someone else will arrive to take your place.

I have learned what I know from some of the best, and I continue to read and study every blessed day the writers and mentors who have come before me in this parade of literature holding the lantern high. Right now I’m reading The Notebooks of Henry James. He will never know the unbelievable gift he has given this unknown editor, just a stranger born long after he died, but he would not want his wisdom to stop with me. So what I get from his notebooks I will share with you.

When it comes time to ask for what you need, know where you stand on the ladder and do not underestimate what you are asking of others. Above all, treat everyone with humility and great good humor.

Never be the one making it more difficult.

Be the one making it easier.

Respect the act of communing.

And when you have made that connection between yourself and other writers, when you have arrived here at the dock and found your seat in the rowboat, when you have said hello and shaken hands and asked politely where they keep the water and rowing gloves, take a moment to bow your head for the beauty of it all.

What goes on between human beings really cannot be explained.

I give everything I can to you because in giving it I’ve found myself.

And you have given me back your hearts.

So this week let’s respond to that joy & fulfillment. Because everything about being writers is about cause-&-effect, even living the life.

Let’s be grateful.

Recognize the source.

Sometimes it’s the littlest things.

I know I’ve mentioned once or twice before a ceremony we do at our house, in which we light a candle and everyone around the dinner table says what they’re thankful for. We wanted our son to have a sense of what’s meaningful in life—in this Age of Meaningless Consumerism, when we don’t really know what we truly need or or want, but we sure know how to buy—and over the years this ceremony has served its purpose well. We’ve all become pretty adept at naming things we appreciate.

Sometimes it’s huge and touching and profound, like having each other, having our health, being safe together every night in a largely dangerous world. Sometimes it’s topical and specific, like the excitement of finishing an important project or the relief of not having to mow the lawn or the peacefulness of the cats not fighting under the table. And sometimes it’s utterly trivial, even silly, like gratitude for spoons and forks, for a particular joke, for curtains, for hair.

When my son was very young, he was often simply thankful for the candle.

Write in great, glorious, intensely specific detail about the touching and profound, the topical and specific, the utterly trivial, even the silly. Write everything you know, everything you imagine, everything that happens to you and everyone you meet or hear about or suspect exists. Write your life.

That’s your source.

Realize what it’s worth.

Train yourself to live in service to this source, and when you have written be aware of how little you bring to this work, how much of it is simply channeling your life into clean, clear words.

Ask yourself what you would do without your source. Hang in suspended animation, forever and infinitely barely surviving, without the extraordinary gift of your five senses or your ability to perceive through them? The ancient Greeks understood stasis and subjected the dead to a period of limbo before resolution to remind us of the value of living.

Your life is the most precious commodity you will ever own.

Give thanks.

So give it its due. Stop right this instant and breathe. Look around you.

Where are you? What does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it feel like? How does it smell? Stick out your tongue—how does it taste? Writing puts all of that into specific words so that it fixes in your memory forever. Working with those words, struggling to find just the right ones in just the right order, learning the many brilliant techniques of written language to re-create the experience of this moment out of all other moments in life, yours or anyone else’s: that is an act of thanks.

You are here. You are you. You are alive.

Writing is your lens through which to refract your gratitude, so it will never leave you.

Let’s start with the good stuff: joy & fulfillment.

Ignore the hype!

It is deafening.

But it is not writing.

It is hype.

Right now we happen to be living through a time of enormous change in publishing, which has brought with it an absolute avalanche of emphasis upon the industry of marketing. Congratulations on the Era of Marketing! Enjoy it while you can, marketers. It hasn’t always been this way for writers, and it won’t always be this way for writers, because it isn’t, in fact, intrinsic to writing itself.

This too shall pass.

And when it does, we will find lying in its wake—just as fully and magnificently as before the avalanche hit—our writing. It does not change just because someone out there changes the process through which we expose it to the public view.

It’s still writing.

Recognize the craft.

Writing is not the same thing as selling our work. It’s not even the same thing as being read.

Writing is using the written word to reach into the fog of invisibility that shrouds our every waking moment and retrieve the primal experience of being alive. All of the arts are tools for this. Painters do it through painting, sculptors do it through sculpture, dancers do it through movement, playwrights, actors, and directors do it through theater, musicians do it through music. But storytellers do it through story, and writers do it through the nearly-infinite variety and flexibility of literacy.

This craft is our chosen tool for retrieval. We writers spend our lives learning to wield this particular tool as perfectly as we are able.

It’s ours.

Reach for the joy!

The truth is we arrive here on this planet mostly just because our parents have sex, and while we’re here we do a whole lot of crying, raging, suffering, wondering, and sometimes noodling around simply being bored.

But we’re in it for the joy.

So focus upon this craft you have chosen—these words and sentences and paragraphs, these pens and pencils and notebooks, typewriters and keyboards and computer screens, these facets of dialog and flashes of action and glimpses of intricate settings. Forget your themes and ideas and feelings, and simply burrow through your written words into the vivid experiences of living. Record those experiences in all their beautiful and dreadful, enormous and tiny, complementary and contradictory detail. Detail.

Wake up from the dream and go outside. Come in again and sink back into the dream. Over and over and over. Reflect your world in words as if you were a mirror, and eventually you will begin to glimpse in the distance behind the figures in the mirror that poignant, often-bittersweet joy we suspect but can’t always feel. You’ll stumble unexpectedly upon a transitory moment of insight into what it all means, especially when you don’t understand what it is you’re trying to say. That moment is what makes life worthwhile and what we writers are after all along.

It’s the unsayable.

That depth of vivid experience is where fulfillment lies.

So let’s sit down together now and ask all those hard, necessary questions a writer must ask themself when they finish a first draft of a novel:

1. Is your protagonist the same character at the end as the beginning?

2. Is the catastrophe your characters are heading toward at the Hook the same one they wind up with at the Climax?

3. Does your protagonist matter more than anyone else in the story?

4. Does your Climax matter more than anything else that happens?

5. Can you clearly state your protagonist’s two mutually-exclusive needs, which drive them relentlessly forward throughout their story?

6. Can you account for every single scene in relation to one or both of those needs?

7. Can you justify basing an entire novel on those needs when you ask yourself why a reader would care?

8. Can you identify exactly how your Climax forces your protagonist to choose between their two needs?

9. Can you link every single scene in an inevitable chain of cause-&-effect toward that Climax?

10. Can you pin-point the tension in every single scene that’s so powerful it makes the reader turn the next page?

11. Have you made your protagonist interesting, entertaining, smart, human, and unique enough to hold a reader’s attention for 50,000 words?

12. Have you shown your protagonist’s world in significant, telling details that simply couldn’t describe anybody else’s fictional world?

13. Have you stuck to only essential dialog?

14. Have you choreographed your action scenes for tightly-paced action?

15. Have you skipped all urges to repeat yourself?

16. Have you avoided every paragraph, sentence, and word of exposition humanly possible?

17. Is any and all exposition left just so brilliant and essential that your story can’t exist without it?

18. Have you moved the Backstory from the beginning to its rightful spot after the Hook (or else cut it altogether)?

19. Have you resisted the urge to ramble in Resolution after the Climax?

20. Is this story truly, sincerely important to you, above and beyond its basic quality of containing a whole lot of words?

21. Will you love sinking ever-deeper into this story in the New Year as you launch into the revisions that are, in actuality, the real work of writing a novel?

22. Are you proud—not of yourself—but of your story?

23. Are you in love?

You are a high-dive artist who just dove into the deepest point of the entire ocean. Congratulations! You’ve got some kind of crazy-brave glitter shining in your eyes!

And when you return to this story later, after a well-earned respite over the holidays, you will begin swimming home.